Month: October 2021

Actor William Shatner, best known for his portrayal of space explorer Captain James T. Kirk in the “Star Trek” television series, announced he will travel to space later this month. Shatner, 90, will blast off October 12 aboard a Blue Origin rocket. Blue Origin is the space travel company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. If successful, Shatner would be the oldest person ever to travel to space. He will be joined by three other passengers on Blue Origin’s second space venture. Bezos was among the first Blue Origin passengers in July. The flight is expected to last about 10 minutes and reach an altitude of 106 kilometers. "I've heard about space for a long time now. I'm taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle," Shatner said…

Pope Francis and other religious leaders made a joint appeal on Monday for next month's U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP26) to offer concrete solutions to save the planet from "an unprecedented ecological crisis". The "Faith and Science: Towards COP26" meeting brought together Christian leaders including Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, as well as representatives of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism and Jainism. "COP26 in Glasgow represents an urgent summons to provide effective responses to the unprecedented ecological crisis and the crisis of values that we are presently experiencing, and in this way to offer concrete hope to future generations," the pope said. "We want to accompany it with our commitment and our spiritual closeness," he said in an address which he gave…

US scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize for discoveries on receptors for temperature and touch, the jury said. "The groundbreaking discoveries... by this year's Nobel Prize laureates have allowed us to understand how heat, cold and mechanical force can initiate the nerve impulses that allow us to perceive and adapt to the world," the Nobel jury said. "In our daily lives we take these sensations for granted, but how are nerve impulses initiated so that temperature and pressure can be perceived? This question has been solved by this year's Nobel Prize laureates." Julius, a professor at the University of California in San Francisco and Patapoutian, a professor at Scripps Research in California, will share the Nobel Prize cheque for 10 million Swedish kronor…

 A British company says it has developed an easy-to-administer, saliva-based test that can detect whether a person is infectious enough to pass along the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The company, Vatic, said in a statement that its test is “extremely accurate” and has not returned a single false positive result in its test group. “This is so important for getting life back to normal,” the company said. Vatic said its “mission was to design a test that people won’t mind using multiple times a week.”  Tests results are available in 15 minutes, the company said. The test is not available to the public yet as it undergoes more trials but Vatic is seeking approval for its sale directly to the public. A report in The Economist says COVID in 2020…

“The pandemic has destabilized societies, economies, and governments. It has shown that there is no global security without global health security,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a recent address to ambassadors and representatives to the European Union’s political and security committee. “The fastest and best way to end this pandemic is with genuine global cooperation on vaccine supply and access,” Tedros said. “The longer vaccine inequity persists, the longer the social and economic turmoil will continue, and the more opportunity the virus has to circulate and change into more dangerous variants. We need a global realization that no country can vaccinate its way out of this pandemic in isolation from the rest of the world.” The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported Sunday it had recorded…

A joint European-Japanese spacecraft got its first glimpse of Mercury as it swung by the solar system's innermost planet while on a mission to deliver two probes into orbit in 2025.  The BepiColombo mission made the first of six flybys of Mercury at 11:34 p.m. GMT Friday, using the planet's gravity to slow the spacecraft down.  After swooping past Mercury at altitudes of under 200 kilometers (125 miles), the spacecraft took a low-resolution black-and-white photo with one of its monitoring cameras before zipping off again.  The European Space Agency said the captured image shows the Northern Hemisphere and Mercury's characteristic pock-marked features, among them the 166-kilometer-wide (103-mile-wide) Lermontov crater.  The joint mission by the European agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency was launched in 2018, flying once past Earth and…

In a normal year, the smokehouses and drying racks that Alaska Natives use to prepare salmon to tide them through the winter would be heavy with fish meat, the fruits of a summer spent fishing on the Yukon River like generations before them.  This year, there are no fish. For the first time in memory, both king and chum salmon have dwindled to almost nothing and the state has banned salmon fishing on the Yukon, even the subsistence harvests that Alaska Natives rely on to fill their freezers and pantries for winter. The remote communities that dot the river and live off its bounty — far from road systems and easy, affordable shopping — are desperate and doubling down on moose and caribou hunts in the waning days of fall. …

Delegates heading to the COP26 U.N. climate summit in Glasgow agreed they must deliver on the $100 billion per year pledge to help most vulnerable nations tackle climate change, COP26 president Alok Sharma said on Saturday.   Speaking after days of meetings at the pre-COP26 climate event in Italy, Sharma said there was a consensus to do more to keep the 1.5 degrees Celsius target within reach, adding more needed to be done collectively in terms of national climate plans.   The COP26 conference in Glasgow aims to secure more ambitious climate action from the nearly 200 countries that signed the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming to well below 2.0 degrees Celsius - and preferably to 1.5 degrees - above pre-industrial levels. ...

The abortion rights battle takes to the streets across America Saturday, with hundreds of demonstrations planned as part of a new "Women's March" aimed at countering an unprecedented conservative offensive to restrict the termination of pregnancies.   The fight has become even more intense since Texas adopted a law on September 1 banning almost all abortions, unleashing a veritable legal guerrilla warfare and a counterattack in Congress, but with few public demonstrations until now.   Two days before the U.S. Supreme Court, which will have the final say on the contentious issue, is due to reconvene, nearly 200 organizations have called on abortion rights defenders to make their voices heard from coast to coast.   The flagship event will be held in the nation's capital Washington, where thousands are expected…

Droughts that cause leaves to turn brown and wither before they can reach peak color. Heat waves prompting leaves to fall before autumn even arrives. Extreme weather events like hurricanes that strip trees of their leaves altogether. For a cheery autumnal activity, leaf peeping is facing some serious threats from the era of climate change. Leaf peeping, the practice of traveling to watch nature display its fall colors, is a beloved annual activity in many corners of the country, especially New England and New York. But recent seasons have been disrupted by weather conditions there and elsewhere, and the trend is likely to continue as the planet warms, said arborists, conservationists and ecologists. Typically, by the end of September, leaves cascade into warmer hues throughout the U.S. This year, many…

At the virtual COVID-19 summit on the margins of the U.N. General Assembly last week, U.S. President Joe Biden announced an additional donation of 500 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine to low-income and lower-middle-income countries, bringing total U.S. pledged donations to 1.1 billion shots. "I made — and I'm keeping — the promise that America will become the arsenal of vaccines as we were the arsenal of democracy during World War II," Biden said at the summit. Here are some facts and context surrounding that claim. How many doses has the U.S. pledged and shipped? Of the 1.1 billion doses the U.S. has promised, nearly 172 million have been shipped to more than 100 countries, according to the State Department. Most are distributed via COVAX, the global vaccine-sharing initiative…

The U.S. is the global leader in vaccine donations, pledging to send 1.1 billion doses to help the world fight the COVID-19 pandemic. But it has shipped only 15% of the doses it has promised. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report. Producer: Bakhtiyar Zamanov  ...

The United States has surpassed 700,000 deaths from COVID-19, the highest of any country. The U.S. recorded 700,258 deaths Friday evening, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Brazil has the second-highest number of deaths, with 597,255. India has 448,339; Mexico, 277,507; and Russia, 204,424, according to Johns Hopkins. Globally, nearly 4.8 million people have died from COVID-19. U.S. health officials say cases have been declining across the United States in recent weeks. However, while the latest wave of COVID-19 has peaked across the country as a whole, some states, especially in the North, are seeing case numbers rise. In other developments in the U.S., California became the first state to announce a vaccine mandate for schoolchildren once the Food and Drug Administration formally approves COVID-19 vaccines…

Members of the White House COVID-19 Response Team said Friday that recent trials showing the effectiveness of the U.S. drug company Merck's experimental new COVID-19 pill were certainly good news, but they stressed that vaccines would remain the best way to end the pandemic.    During the response team's virtual briefing, top U.S. infectious-disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said early data from the studies on the Merck COVID-19 pill were "impressive," including a 50% reduction in hospitalizations and deaths. White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients said the U.S. government had already arranged to buy 1.7 million doses of the pill, with an option for more if needed. If approved for emergency use, the Merck pill would be the first COVID-19 treatment that could be taken orally and not through injection…

A joint mission of the European and Japanese space agencies, the spacecraft BepiColombo is set to make a close, initial flyby of Mercury on Friday as part of a seven-year mission to put two probes in orbit around the solar system's closest planet to the sun.  In a statement on its website, the European Space Agency explains the spacecraft, launched in 2018, will swoop by Mercury on Friday at an altitude of about 200 kilometers (124.3 miles), capturing imagery and data that will give scientists preliminary information on the planet they hope to explore in depth when the mission puts two probes into orbit there in 2025.  The ESA says the British-built spacecraft will make use of the gravitational swing of nine planetary flybys — one at Earth, two at…

The U.S. government says it wants to partner with African countries to combat climate change. A U.S. climate envoy, who is in South Africa to prepare for a key conference next month, said the fight must be an international one. "These kinds of damages do not limit themselves to one country," said Jonathan Pershing, U.S. deputy special presidential envoy for climate change. "You can't say I have got a problem and nobody else does. But neither would any country be immune. You don't have to be a landlocked country or an island country or coastal country. We are all in this together.  "That brings me to why I have come to Africa. It's the fastest growing continent, it's a continent in many ways it represents the future, what it chooses…

Geneticists, led by Harvard Medical School's George Church, aim to bring the woolly mammoth back to life by 2027. But some experts aren’t sure it’s such a good idea. Karina Bafradzhian has the story. ...

As COVID-19 has spread in Nigeria, Africa's most populated country, so have myths about the virus, especially among children. A Nigerian author has written a children's book to help them understand the pandemic and ways to avoid being infected. A team of educators arrives at a government school in Abuja. Equipped with books, face masks and sanitizers, they're here to educate schoolchildren about the coronavirus pandemic and personal hygiene. The initiative is the brainchild of team leader Raquel Kasham Daniel, a Nigerian author and founder of the nonprofit Beyond the Classroom Foundation. She started the foundation 11 years ago to help make education accessible to vulnerable children. But she said when COVID-19 hit Nigeria last year, she had to focus on teaching children how to stay safe or reduce their…

Australia will reopen its international borders in November to allow vaccinated travelers into the country for the first time in 18 months. Australia banned most foreign nationals in March of last year and required its citizens to seek official permission to leave the country. Now it is preparing to reopen to the world. Under a government plan, international passengers will be able to quarantine at home for seven days rather than the current 14-day mandatory period in hotel isolation. There will be no travel restrictions for fully vaccinated Australians entering or leaving the country, although major airlines have warned they are not yet ready for a swift increase in flights. The government is also working toward quarantine-free travel with other countries, including New Zealand. Passengers who are not vaccinated, or…